On swarms and social networking ...

“Personal connections--forged through words, pictures, video, and audio posted just for the hell of it--are the life of the new Web, bringing together the estimated 60 million bloggers, those 72 million MySpace users, and millions more on single-use social networks where people share one category of stuff, like Flickr (photos), Del.icio.us (links), Digg (news stories), Wikipedia (encyclopedia articles), and YouTube (video).

This hive of activity has already generated a lot of noise, but what most observers have yet to realize is just how productive the hive really is and how powerful it can be when it swarms in a particular direction”

Swarms -- yes, we need these in libraries! But how do we get the majority of our staff who still heavily populate that “most observers” category to acknowledge the swarm before we are severely stung- or worse yet, they abandon our hive?

Read the full article [an interesting read] and then go check out TagWorld, aka the “myspace killer.”